I died once before.

At thirteen, the river water rushed into my lungs. Hungry. Insistent. My older brother had been there to pump it from me and command my heart back into life.

“You stupid girl,” he said, but there were tears in his eyes. “Your place is at home.”

But I was tired of caring for the little ones Mama left behind after her death. She had taught me the hidden magic of the natural world. How a root might be ground into fine powder and used to heal a cough. How the wind and water bent to no power but what they held themselves, and how if you were still enough, you could let that same power enter you. I had no use for the confinement of a house. For the tug of a babe at my skirts with its always hungry, screaming mouth.

So when the accusations began in my thirty-fifth year, in whispers that warned of violence, I marveled at how one could cheat death twice in her life. Once, I’d faced it without fear, but now, it coiled through me, hot and slick as oil. I saw its poison everywhere. I felt it in every muscle as I hurried home, my cap pulled down to cover my face as much as possible.

I was not the first accused. There were two others before the rope’s shadow fell over me. Women who courted more suspicion than I by virtue of their lack of a husband. Unmarried with a little coin outweighed my small ministrations to the sick. A poultice for a wound that would not heal or a tonic for a cough were small compared to what could be gained from a woman with property who’d refused marriage.

We’d all been there to see them tried. Every woman turned her face toward heaven as she watched her neighbor or friend garble a final prayer before the rope did its work. Mercy dying on our lips as we made ourselves small so that terrible, holy eye might not swing toward us.